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Random Verse - West Revisited 2009

Saturday, December 19, 2009

In 1995, I made a journey. It had began as a simple trip to Dallas to pick up a car for my in-laws and drive it back to Utah. At the time, I was unhappy. I don't think I realized it at the time. I was thirty one and still wanting to be twenty one. Somewhere between Dallas and Salt Lake City, something cathartic happened.

It wasn't one of those epiphanies where everything is suddenly seen in stark relief. It was just that a peace came over me. A level of acceptance of who I was, both my capabilities and shortcomings. At the time I composed a poem called West. When I think of it today, it was incomplete. At the time, I was not, as yet, fully aware of the significance of the event. More likely, I wasn't emotionally mature enough to understand what had happened.

West Revisited 2009

In 1995 he traveled west
Clapton covered The Stones
And Elvis wasn’t there

The dark closed in
as he left Amarillo behind
Lightning on plains in the panhandle

His petty emotional storms
merely a pale imitation
of natures own

The trip continued
along the edge of the Rockies
and through the heart of the west

It was not an epiphany
in the high deserts
Of Wyoming

It was just time for a change
to stop hiding in the past
and fearing for the future